Voice Actors: How To Create Personas
In voiceover, ‘personas’ are simply extensions of you.
They can represent different parts of your personality, the curious one, the all-knowing one, the one who’s concerned, or the excited one who’s just discovered the best place to buy great workout gear.
Perhaps the messenger in the script is that of a caring health professional, perhaps a young man searching for the right car, a woman who has found the best University to study at, or the retired couple, just about to take off on a journey.
Good voice actors know how to create characterful reads.
That is, they look at the script, determine whom the message is intended for, and whose shoes they need to jump into to make this read really work.
When you first look at your script, these are the things in order that you need to know:
- What is the product or idea that you’re talking about?
- Where are the keywords and phrases that are about what it’s about?
- What problem does this product or idea solve?
- Whom are you talking to?
- What are you trying to convince them of?
- What you need to do now is to make a study of how different your voice can sound given different sets of circumstances.
PRACTICE TECHNIQUES
Test it by trying this.
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Find a simple script with a simple message. Then apply some different personas to the read.
Be specific.
Without changing your voice as you would for a cartoon voice, you’ll need to adjust your natural speaking voice in one, or all, of these three ways:
1 Pitch
2 Tone
3 Age
You can then look at pace, energy and volume, to help round out the authenticity of the read.
Make firm decisions and make sure you’re consistent with that persona across the whole read.
Increasing your repertoire of characterful voices will help your versatility.
It will also be an aid to decision-making when you are either in the studio or working remotely with a producer.
When you’ve successfully worked to build your understanding of characterful reads, it’ll be time to create some great samples that you can send to those you’ve worked with, or include on your voice demos.
When you do this well, you’ll grow relationships in the industry and increase your work. And we all want that.
Happy voiceovering!